I spoke recently at Shift, the IDSA conference held at RISD. I outlined seventeen ways to not suck at research:

1. Quit worrying about jargon
2. Think more broadly about which people you want to learn about
3. Garbage in, garbage out
4. Give other people the space to tell their stories
5. Follow up, and then follow up, and then follow up
6. Do you really want to use a survey? Probably not.
7. Collect and use natural language
8. Don’t forget that any research process with real live humans is hard
9. Breathe their air
10. Learning anything new requires rapport, and building rapport takes time
11. Finding insights requires pattern matching, creativity, synthesis
12. Personas are user-centered bullshit
13. Phil McKinney says “You’re probably not listening.”
14. Practice noticing stuff and telling stories (updated: read more here)
15. Do some improv
16. Embrace pop culture
17. Don’t forget about culture and social norms

The presentation was very well received, and I hope to share this material with another group before too long.

16 Responses to “Seventeen ways to not suck at research”

tools around it. Maybe they could even innovate something new while they are at it. Are we really at the point where reputable news services can create stories based on MySpace pages and email interviews? What is an email interview anyway? #13 of Steve Portigal’s Seventeen ways to not suck at research is: Phil McKinney says, “You’re probably not listening.” How do you listen in an email interview? I guess there weren’t many follow-up questions.

[…] I’m not being a research snob here. I understand the timeline didn’t support the teams doing their own research. But Microsoft supplied personals. Aren’t personals proxies for research? Or, are they, (as I’ve said before) simply user-centered bullshit. For all the power they are supposed to have with design teams to keep them focused on designing for the user, they didn’t help at all in this case. […]

to make the craft seem “scientific”. But why spend time defining the characteristics of each segment if it turns out everybody is a mix of all of them -“a Straddler . . . with certain Learner/Navigator undercurrents”? Agreed. As I’vewritten before, personas are user-centered bullshit.